The trajectory of twentieth-century African American literature in the post-Second World War decades is generally assumed to work something like this: starting with Richard Wright, one will move to Ralph Ellison, maybe linger some on Zora Neale Hurston, hover over the Black Arts Movement and Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka, then jump to Alice Walker, and crown the narrative with Toni Morrison. Depending upon particular interest, a few names might be added such as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Alex Haley, Ishmael Reed, and Nikki Giovanni, for example. Therefore, the wealth and variety of African American writing published on the heels of Richard Wright, and before the creative explosions of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and womanist writing in the 1970s and 1980s, might come as a surprise for some. Since the 1980s there has been a growing market for and greater mainstream scholarly recognition of this sizeable body of work. As early as 1979, Gayl Jones captured the richness she believed to be unique in earlier black literature, calling our attention to its “speech and music continuum. Jazz. Sermon. Incantation. Words as voice heard and music. Whole range of Black speech and music. Ritual. A constant movement and flowing into. Magic song and sound and voice. Constant movement between different kinds of language. Social reality in whole form – history.”